The Intelerad team was recently in Auckland, New Zealand, for the 70th Annual Scientific Meeting of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Radiologists (RANZCR), the largest healthcare tradeshow of the region.
With over 1,000 attendees, RANZCR is a can’t-miss gathering in Oceania, and we took advantage of this opportunity to announce three new exciting solutions: the Imaging Connectivity Suite™, a product bundle designed to improve connectivity for Oceania hospitals, our expanded nuage™ Managed Services, with enhanced capabilities for long-term storage and cloud-hosted PACS through new Tier 3 and Tier 4 data center partners, and Odyssey™, a new AI-augmented workflow solution designed to encourage healthcare service providers to adopt artificial intelligence.
For Gary Moss, Vice President of Sales for Oceania, the most significant takeaway message from RANZCR 2019 is that “this was the year that AI in radiology came of age”. For the first time, Intelerad had a keynote speaker (Chris Wood, our new CTO), and with the advent of Odyssey product campaign and our innovative approach to commercializing AI we have the springboard in place. As Gary says, “Intelerad is ideally placed at the forefront of moving AI out of the academic sphere and into the arena of high quality clinical practice”.
RANZCR is a bit of a homecoming event for Intelerad, because some of our first clients were located in Australia and New Zealand. Oceania is a fantastic success story for Intelerad, because it goes to the heart of who we are and what we stand for. Allow me to share some tidbits of our early history to explain.
Just as the name Intelerad came into existence, we benefited from word-of-mouth in the tight-knit radiology community and from the mobility of radiologists moving about around the world. From our homebase at MUHC, to Toronto, all the way to Australia, radiologists spoke about our PACS, which resulted in our founders being invited to do a demo in Perth, Australia. Radiologists from Perth then recommended our PACS to New Zealand radiologists from Canterbury District Health Board (CDHB).
Why the interest in newly minted Intelerad and its PACS? Australian radiologists working at a Canadian hospital using our PACS returned home with stories that we were offering something revolutionary at the time. We were offering remote service and support, which meant real-time responses instead of hours or even days of waiting for an on-site technician. We would visit the continent to do demos, training and integration, but everything else was done remotely. For our founders and first employees, it entailed carrying pagers going off at all hours of the night, but given the trust and opportunity awarded to us, they were happy to get online and help.
Fast forward to today, a majority of the studies processed in Oceania’s private market are done so through our solutions. And from almost entirely remote services supported by a small local team, Intelerad now has a team of over 50 people working out of Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane which makes it one of the largest providers, in terms of local workforce, in this part of the world.
How did we achieve that? Thanks to the strong relationships we continued to build over time.
As consolidation increased in the industry in Oceania, our early clients were purchased and integrated into larger organisations. For example, our Perth client became part of the large I-MED network of Australia. What contributed to our growth is that our existing clients insisted on keeping their Intelerad PACS when joining larger networks. They were such great ambassadors of Intelerad, that not only did they get to keep using our PACS, but they convinced the entire network to standardize on our PACS.
And because Oceania was a leader in the marketplace in terms of the consolidation of radiology practices, it drove our initial focus around product scalability and it allowed our sales teams down under to become leaders in selling our solutions to hospitals in larger healthcare regions. This approach continues to bear its fruit: our Oceania team has won the Metro North and Gold Coast healthcare regions and I’ll be able to share more good news very shortly, stay tuned!
Intelerad may have built its name with radiology practices in Oceania, but increasingly we find ourselves going back to where it all started for us, the hospital market. Our team in Oceania is constantly working hard to find innovative ways to meet the needs of care providers and have done a stellar job to drive the adoption, by referring physicians, of our InteleViewer™ and InteleConnect® EV solutions. As a matter of fact, Metro North and Gold Coast referring physicians are our biggest users of InteleConnect EV. The team is also focused on helping our customers better service their patients with solutions like our nuage Patient Portal. Given our focus on providing solutions tailored to our clients’ needs, it only made sense to introduce our Imaging Connectivity Suite, combining all three of our most popular solutions in Oceania hospitals.
So what does the Oceania story say about who we are and what we stand for? First, it demonstrates very vividly how crucial our customer-focus approach was then and how important it continues to be today. Our dedication to providing stellar services and solutions to our clients, our ability to listen to them and our agility to adapt our solutions to their needs have all been key to Intelerad’s identity and mission.
Second, it shows the power of word-of-mouth for strong client references. Clients are, along with our employees, the greatest ambassadors for our product and our brand. Our Oceania positioning today is due in great part to clients believing in us and sharing with others their positive experiences with our people and our solutions.
The significance of this is translated into our Net Promoter Score (NPS), an index measuring clients’ willingness to recommend products and services to others. This is a key metric for us, because we strive to put the customer first in everything that we do. Our score today reflects this focus and our dedication, and our aim is to get better and better every year. With a team like we have, the solutions that we are bringing to market and our relentless focus on listening to our customers and their needs, I’m confident we will achieve our ambitious objectives in that regard, for 2020 and the coming years. I personally look forward to meeting again with some of our Oceania customers at RSNA later this year and in spending time visiting our brand new office in Melbourne in early 2020 to spend time with our Oceania InteleRaiders.
Until next time,
Paul.